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> I search for how much oil does my <ICE vehicle> take" and get the exact answer in a single sentence, or I suppose I could click the links and wade through all the validation for choosing <ICE vehicle> and how often one should change the oil, and which brand of oil that blog is pushing etc etc.

Don't you have to do that _anyway_? Unless you're just blindly trusting the AI to be correct, and if that's the case, please do enjoy gluing your cheese to your pizza.

Yeah, but perhaps we're getting to the point where the AI synthesis of all reachable data sources is going to be more truthy than trusting whatever random anonymous result you pick from the top half of the results page.

I'm also finding that the AI-cited links are often more helpful and authoritative than the top search results.

I like having a direct answer to my question "how much oil does my engine take" but as of today I do not trust the answer to be correct, so I still cross check several sources, ideally ones that appear to be authoritative.

I asked claude to dig up the current Ford Bulletin for the engine in my truck to tell me the recommended motor oil. And it found the updated recommendations properly. I wouldn't trust google AI because I know specifically that the recommendations changed, and I don't want whatever the published specs were when the engine was first manufactured, which is out of date (and found on lots of low quality blogs). I don't even trust claude, but it gave me the URL to click on to verify and summarized it well enough that I mostly trusted that it wasn't using the cited technical bulletin and not a bunch of random AI-slop web pages.

I wouldn't trust any 'confident stochastic next-word predictor' to tell me fact. There are official sources of information for these kinds of car maintenance questions.

Right, but standard Google search doesn't find them reliably either. Instead you get answers from enthusiast forums, "quick oil change" franchise sites, SEO slop, and maybe somehing from the actual manufacturer site if you scroll down.

Better than asking your backyard mechanic buddy who believes that you don't need anything other than 10W40 or something like that. You have always had to know who to trust and what level of work you need to do in order to get to an answer which is satisfactory. And in this case, Claude cited the manufacturer's bulletin which is the actual best source of truth that you're talking about.

Being critical about AI companies isn't what's pushing new people away from the tech world. The AI companies and the consequences of their actions are, as well as comments like this pretending the issues don't exist and that we need to just be positive about the "future".

And supposing these technologies do take us into the future: when said future is bleak and worse in most ways than what came before, people aren't going to be encouraged or enthusiastic about the tech world.

> search for how much oil does my <ICE vehicle> take" and get the exact answer in a single sentence

How do you know the answer is exact?

> or I suppose I could click the links and wade through all the validation for choosing <ICE vehicle> and how often one should change the oil, and which brand of oil that blog is pushing etc etc.

Where do you think that "exact answer" is being scraped and averaged-out from?

Are you going to enjoy a future where those different sources can't be found, so now Google requires you to have a subscription that includes data about vehicle repair? The great thing about the web before was that the information was available for everyone, it was decentralized. This is what they are trying to kill.

> The world seems to be fragmenting, into those that see the value in the latest from Google, and those that resist changes like this.

This reads as a strongly closed minded claim that has been "whitewashed into corporate appropriate speech" by an llm. If you cannot understand any validity to the other side of a debate then you are not engaging in discussion, no matter how your claims are dressed up.

You're entitled to your opinion. But "we should embrace the stuff big tech is doing" does not follow from "let's be welcoming to new entrants to the field". They are, of course, welcome to their opinions as well. But even if they and I disagree on things, that doesn't make them unwelcome. So no, I'm not going to embrace the slop Google is putting out based on a spurious concern over welcoming newcomers.

I've never seen such a reaction to Apple on HN. Quite to the contrary, there are a lot of fanboys here. A lot of macOS-only software is promoted here and I rarely see any complaints in the comments.